Lunar Attractions

Clark Blaise

David has always been special, attuned to the dark side of things, pulled toward the disturbing undercurrents beneath the slick surface of American life. As a whimsical, misunderstood boy growing up in the Florida backwoods, he maps out a reality less hostile than the snapping gators and insensitive school teachers of his rural home. As an adolescent he gets a shocking introduction to sensuality, a sexual initiation in stark contrast to the gentle first-kiss fantasies of teenaged dreams. Lunar Attractions brilliantly captures the manic nature of our times.

`After two collections of stories and a non-fiction collaboration, Lunar Attractions was my belated first novel, the last book of my youth. It turned out to be the last of many other things; the last book written as a full Canadian, the last written in traditional cursive script with a fountain pen in spiral notebooks, the last written on a sabbatical, with money in the bank, without interruption, in the full confidence that it would find an audience, and endure. I look back on that year - 1976-77 - with bittersweet bewilderment: how could I expect that writing would be so easy, expectation so smoothly fulfilled? As I say, that's youth.

`Lunar Attractions was written on a wide bed under a fan in a rented house in the north block of Panch Shila Park, New Delhi, India. We were on academic leave from Montreal because of my wife's appointment, for a year, as Resident Director of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute. This carried stipends and diplomatic perks; we had, for the only time in our life, a domestic staff, someone to shop, someone else to cook, yet another to clean. The children were picked up at seven-thirty every morning by the American Embassy School bus, and didn't return till four. Nearly every night we had diplomatic functions to attend, a circle of friends and acquaintances far removed from teaching and writing. We had access to cabinet-level Indian officials, journalists, writers and film-makers, as well as the cultural attach[e']s of every Western power in New Delhi. We were thirty-six years old and accustomed to a far different reception and status in Canada. This was an optimum year, and the best possible conditions for writing a book that I will ever enjoy. We had no money worries, thanks to a Canada Council grant, Bharati's Shastri (rupee) stipend, and the advance on this book. This is my only book written under the gift of time and concentration. Lunar Attractions was written in an unduplicatable state of grace.

`We were even enjoying a bit of literary celebrity. Shortly after arriving, an earlier book, Days and Nights in Calcutta, appeared. It was not circulated in India, but it was nevertheless widely reviewed, especially by enemies of Mrs Gandhi's bogus `Emergency'. This gave us cachet, and access to India's underground, and especially its pool of dissenting journalists. My two earlier story collections and Bharati's two earlier novels made us, in a small way, celebrated authors in the circumscribed precincts of the diplomatic enclaves. (Bharati's 1975 novel, Wife, was something of a scandalous success; its India-born heroine ends the book by murdering her Indian husband in New York. Scrupulous readers in the ACSA Library asked delicately about Bharati's `first husband', and sometimes asked me if she'd won acquittal or had actually served time.) Readers don't want to accept invention; if the author admits that it `didn't really happen,' then suddenly the whole book becomes unconvincing, even improbable. (I've heard them: `Yeah, that didn't seem too believable ...') If we admit to following a rough outline of verifiable truth, then we're mere journalists.'
- Clark Blaise, from the Introduction

`Engaging, stirring and hard to put down ... a born storyteller ... a writer to savour.'
- The New York Times Book Review

`The most ferocious and astonishing scene of adolescent sexual first contact ever written: in English: in fiction.'
- The National Review

`A spooky and wonderful book about growing up. I thought there were no new ways to write about adolescence, but Clark Blaise has proved me wrong.'
- Dan Wakefield

`At first Lunar Attractions looks like a very good first novel.... In fact, wow! It's terrific! And then, during one of the most surprising sex scenes you'll ever read in your life, it starts getting better.... Lunar Attractions has scenes like Emma being seduced by Rodolphe in Madame Bovary, or Julien stumbling across Europe battlefields in The Charterhouse of Parma, or Dean Moriary parking cars in On the Road.'
- The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Photo by Emma Dodge Hanson

Clark Blaise has taught in Montreal, Toronto, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, as well as at Skidmore College, Columbia University, Iowa, NYU, Sarah Lawrence and Emory. For several years he directed the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Among the most widely travelled of authors, he has taught or lectured in Japan, India, Singapore, Australia, Finland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Holland, Germany, Haiti, and Mexico.

He now lives in San Francisco with his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, and teaches at the University of California-Berkeley.

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